He Numbered Them
Bill Gates ranked his three AI proposals and said which mattered most. Almost every outlet led with number three.
Bill Gates ranked his three AI proposals and said which mattered most. Almost every outlet led with number three. What happened On 26 August 2026 , Bill Gates published an essay on gatesnotes titled "The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical." — 5,784 words by the WSJ's count. He names three big risks : jobs disappearing forever, AI empowering people (and perhaps AIs) to do more harm, and AI stunting children's development and replacing human relationships. Then, two-thirds of the way through, he writes the sentence that tells you how to read everything after it: "Here are three to start, beginning with what I think is the most important one ." Rank Proposal His framing --- --- --- 1 A new domestic and international institutional framework "The highest priority" 2 "Human Reserved" — jobs set aside for people His coined term 3 Tax AI tokens and robots Fund retraining and the safety net Nearly every outlet led with the tax. The proposal that got buried Gates's institutional argument is about jurisdictional gaps , and it is the sharpest reasoning in the piece: "A labor department may understand workforce disruption but not security risk. A business regulator may understand market concentration but not AI's effects on children and teenagers. Left to themselves, institutions will see only one part of the system." Which produces the line that should have been the headline: "An AI-enabled attack might succeed because no one thought it was their job to stop it." He scales the ask honestly. After 9/11 the US government undertook its biggest reorganisation since the Second World War in order to improve one function. AI, he lists, touches national security, employment, education, taxation, energy, elections, air and water, public health, the financial system, law enforcement, transportation, public lands and IT. Internationally he wants a body combining elements of the nuclear-weapons inspections regime , international aviation regulation and the ozone-layer agreements — and concedes that "some cooperation between the U.S. and China will be required." The proposal that led Oren Etzioni — University of Washington computer science professor and founding CEO of the Allen Institute for AI — took the tax apart within a day: "I think that taxing tokens is like taxing keystrokes on a typewriter. It doesn't make sense." He is right about the instrument. A token is a unit of computation, not of labour substitution: identical token counts produce a legal memorandum or a limerick with nothing to distinguish them. He also asked the jurisdictional question — "if we tax American tokens, then what happens when people use Chinese models?" But Gates's actual argument is narrower and better than its reception: "If you're an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings. But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense. The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines. " That